You'll be relieved to know that there will not be a "religious war” with an open source community on one side and commercial proponents on the other, in Europe, according to IDC (News - Alert). 

 

Rather, says Bo Lykkegaard, research director, European Enterprise Applications and Services, IDC, "it will all come down to a battle over who can provide the customer with the most ERP or CRM per euro."

The research firm has issued a study titled “Open Source Enterprise Applications in Europe: Disruption Ahead?” examining SugarCRM (News - Alert) and open source vendors' adoption in the enterprise applications market "from both a demand side and a supply side," firm officials say. 

The study offers in-depth profiles of SugarCRM and other open source application vendors in Europe.

A couple months ago, TMC reported that SugarCRM announced Sugar Express, described by company officials at the time as "addressing SugarCRM open source users’ demand for an affordable product that runs on SugarCRM’s on-demand computing platform, the Sugar Open Cloud."

 

Sugar Express provides core sales, marketing and support features, Sugar Plug-Ins for Microsoft (News - Alert) Office and access to SugarCRM Customer Support. Platform functionality includes the Module Builder to create custom modules and Cloud Connectors to integrate third-party data services from companies such as Hoover’s and Jigsaw.

IDC officials say the survey of 515 Western European IT decision makers in organizations with more than 50 employees showed "surprisingly high usage of open source enterprise applications." IDC identified the "main driver" behind open source adoption as "the absence of an upfront license payment along with a lower total cost of ownership.

Not that it's overwhelming European business -  nine percent of respondents reported current use of an open-source back-office application and seven percent reported using an open source CRM application.

 

Still, relatively speaking, that's not bad. "In an enterprise applications market in which large vendors boast a ten percent market share, adoption rates of nine percent and seven percent appear very high," says Bo Lykkegaard, research director, European Enterprise Applications and Services, IDC, adding that the survey results "show that open source adoption in ERP and CRM has reached a critical threshold and should now make a 'bleep' on every vendor's radar screen, particularly for those that compete in the mid-market."